Campus Curiosities: Agricultural Robotics Lab
October 10, 2024
Meet "OmniAgrobot," a robotic dog tracking down problematic plant disease.
Ce Yang and her team of students in the Agricultural Robotics Lab are working to develop new technologies to make farming more efficient and cost effective.
Yang, an associate professor in Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering, has been using a variety of remote sensing technologies for crop stress detection and nutrient management. Most recently, the team built a prototype of a quadruped or robot dog, called OmniAgrobot. The dog can be used to gather data with cameras and sensors in various field conditions.
OmniAgrobot's small size allows it to navigate terrain and spaces that can’t be monitored with drones or other wheeled robots. In 2021, the Yang lab started brainstorming ways to solve the problem of traversing through an open uneven field for real-time wheat disease phenotyping. After taking into consideration multiple designs, the quadruped platform was chosen. The quadruped robot would be able to traverse through areas of the field where wheeled robots would get stuck, providing an alternative.
Still in its early stages, the team hopes the robot dog will eventually be deployed to help researchers improve their work and help farmers increase production while reducing their costs.
Yang's team plans to bring OmniAgrobot to a quadruped competition during the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation next spring.
